08/25/2026
Raise the bar with support and enthusiasm. Students will reach for it and succeed.
Start assigning college students the hard readings again, Walt Hunter wrote in February—you’ll learn something along the way. https://theatln.tc/1DaQ3G53
“I’ve taught for nearly two decades, but last fall I was worried in a way I’d never been before,” Hunter writes. He was concerned by anecdotes and statistics about the decline of reading, his own raddled attention span, and the apparent inevitability of AI-generated essays. “And yet my fears that students might refuse to read helped clarify my approach … I would teach the students what I was starting to miss myself: tarrying with an author beyond his best-known works, developing a relationship with a novelist across wildly different novels.”
“Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it,” Hunter writes. “Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, ‘Walden’!—could do precisely that.”
Hunter changed the way he teaches—he axed take-home essays for example, so they would have more time to read, replacing them with in-class, timed “flash essays”; he changed his assignment prompts, and more. Why did the students start reading? “Because I asked them to, and told them it was worth it,” Hunter writes. “I said that time was precious, and that we needed to take some of it back for ourselves. So we did.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
